The Supreme Court yesterday overturned a Taiwan High Court ruling last year that found the defendants in the “Hsichih Trio” case not guilty.
Saying there were “contradictory accounts” and issues that needed further investigation, the Supreme Court returned the case to the Taiwan High Court for retrial.
The latest ruling marked another turn in the series of legal twists that has seen the case drag on for more than two decades.
The “Hsichih Trio” are Su Chien-ho (蘇建和), Liu Bin-lang (劉秉郎) and Chuang Lin-hsun (莊林勳), who, along with Wang Wen-hsiao (王文孝), were suspected of robbing and murdering Wu Min-han (吳銘漢) and his wife, Yeh Ying-lan (葉盈蘭), in the Taipei suburb” of Sijhih (汐止), also known as Hsichih, on March 24, 1991. The couple were found dead in their apartment. They had been stabbed 79 times.
Wang, an army conscript, was sentenced and executed under military law in January 1992.
Su, Liu and Chuang were incarcerated in 1991 at the age of 19 and remained in jail until 2003, eight of those years spent on death row.
In May 2000, then-state public prosecutor-general Chen Han (陳涵) made three extraordinary appeals to the Supreme Court for a retrial. In January 2003, the High Court acquitted the trio. Prosecutors filed another appeal with the Supreme Court, which ordered yet another retrial. The High Court again sentenced the three to death in June 2007.
In 2009, the trio’s panel of lawyers presented a report by forensic scientist Henry Lee (李昌鈺), which said that a single killer could have carried out the double murder and rape.
Referring to new information given in the forensic report by Lee, the high court in November last year said Wang had most likely acted alone in committing the two murders. The court reversed the death sentences given to the three by the high court in June 2007 on charges of robbery and premeditated murder.
Expressing regret over the latest ruling, Su Yiu-chen (蘇友辰), the trio’s defense lawyer, asserted his clients’ innocence.
We will never see the end of this case if the court remains overly fastidious, he added.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it opposes the introduction of migrant workers from India until a mechanism is in place to prevent workers from absconding. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on Thursday told the Legislative Yuan that the first group of migrant workers from India could be introduced as early as this year, as part of a government program. The caucus’ opposition to the policy is based on the assessment that “the risk is too high,” KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) said. Taiwan has a serious and long-standing problem of migrant workers absconding from their contracts, indicating that
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